Month: February 2015
From the Washington Post: Feminist Writers Besieged Online
Michelle Goldberg | The Washington Post
Jessica Valenti is one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation. As a columnist for the Guardian, her face regularly appears on the site’s front page. She has written five books, one of which was adapted into a documentary, since founding the blog Feministing.com. She gives speeches all over the country. And she tells me that, because of the nonstop harassment that feminist writers face online, if she could start over, she might prefer to be completely anonymous. “I don’t know that I would do it under my real name,” she says she tells young women who are interested in writing about feminism. It’s “not just the physical safety concerns but the emotional ramifications” of constant, round-the-clock abuse.
This is a strange, contradictory moment for feminism. On one hand, there’s never been so much demand for feminist voices. Pop stars such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift proudly don the feminist mantle, cheered on by online fans. After years when it was scorned by the mainstream press, the movement is an editorial obsession: Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” Lena Dunham’s “Not That Kind of Girl,” Roxane Gay’s “Bad Feminist” and Amy Poehler’s “Yes Please” occupy, and sometimes top, bestseller lists. “Stories about race and gender bias draw huge audiences, making identity politics a reliable profit center in a media industry beset by insecurity,” Jonathan Chait recently wrote in New York magazine — a proposition that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
On the other hand, while digital media has amplified feminist voices, it has also extracted a steep psychic price. Women, urged to tell their stories, are being ferociously punished when they do. Some — particularly women who have the audacity to criticize sexism in the video-game world — have been driven from their homes or forced to cancel public appearances. Fake ads soliciting rough sex have been placed in their names. And, of course, the Twitter harassment never stops. “Being insulted and threatened online is part of my job,” Lindy West, formerly of Jezebel, recently said on “This American Life.” Adds Jamia Wilson, executive director of the feminist advocacy group Women, Action and the Media, “It really can affect the way that people feel about themselves.”
Feminists of the past faced angry critics, letters to the editor and even protests. But the incessant, violent, sneering, sexualized hatred their successors absorb is harder to escape. For women of color, racial abuse comes along with the sexism. “I have received racialized rape threats that I don’t think I would necessarily receive if I were white,” Wilson says. “A lot of things about anatomy — black women’s anatomy.” She talks about the online abuse in therapy. “There is trauma, especially related to the death and rape threats,” she says. Eventually, such sustained abuse ends up changing people — both how they live and how they work.
In her epochal book “Backlash,” Susan Faludi described the anti-feminist cultural messages of the 1980s as a “relentless whittling-down process” that “served to stir women’s private anxieties and break their political wills.” Today’s online backlash may be even more draining. It saps morale and leads to burnout. “You can’t get called a c— day in, day out for 10 years and not have that make a really serious impact on your psyche,” says Valenti, who thinks about quitting “all the time.” Just how long can this generation of feminists endure?
Uppity women, of course, have long been targets of rage and contempt. In 1969, when Marilyn Webb spoke about feminism at an antiwar demonstration in Washington, many of the men who were listening erupted, screaming at her to strip and demanding that she be pulled down and raped. Feminists of the second wave regularly contended with real-world hostility from left-wing men that would be inconceivable today. Nona Willis Aronowitz, features editor at Talking Points Memo, is the daughter of the revered late feminist writer Ellen Willis, who wrote for publications including the Village Voice and the New Yorker. “Forget random online commentators — people who were working at her same publications were total sexists,” Aronowitz says. Male Voice staffers, Willis once wrote, regularly referred to their female colleagues as the “Stalinist feminists.”
So stories today about Internet abuse inevitably elicit cliches about heat and kitchens — demands that women toughen up and grow thicker skin. Punditry and activism, after all, are relatively cushy gigs. Reading “nasty virtual tweets” is far better than being “an undocumented immigrant trying to feed your family in America, or somebody who is wrongfully incarcerated, or any of the issues I used to work on,” acknowledges Sally Kohn, a Daily Beast columnist who was previously the only left-wing lesbian feminist contributor at Fox News, making her an especial target for trolls.
Yet try as women might to brush them off, the online pile-ons can leave them reeling, says Aronowitz. Some young writers have told her, only half-jokingly, that they feel like they have PTSD. “Are they not going to write a piece like that again because they’re afraid of the online hate?”
Indeed, some are not. In 2013, the pro-choice activist Jaclyn Munson wrote about going undercover at an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center. Soon a stalker was sending her death threats. They scared her so much, she started sleeping with the lights on. A year ago, exhausted and depleted, she largely gave up writing online, deleted her Twitter account and now plans to go to law school, which she hopes will let her work on the issues she cares about in a safer, less exposed way. “It was just becoming really emotionally overwhelming to be on the front lines all the time,” she says.
The Quotable Ben Franklin #1
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you are a better man.
Angry White Men: A Book Review
David Michael Newstead
Angry White Men examines the bitter feelings of resentment among a wide swath of American white males. Arguably, this phenomenon was brought on by decades of social and economic changes, while our concept of masculinity remains fundamentally unaltered. The gulf between the two has resulted in what the author refers to as a sense of “aggrieved entitlement”, which saturates American culture…
…through talk radio, internet trolling, hate groups, militias, political pundits, violence, and widespread disdain aimed at feminists.
To understand the depths and origins of these views, Sociologist Michael Kimmel spoke to white men across the United States and explored how their anger touches on a multitude of issues in our country. This includes discussions on domestic violence, divorced dads, men’s rights groups, and the politicians who attempt to capitalize on this feeling of white male alienation. Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, and the Tea Party were all regularly mentioned as identifiable focal points in this cultural divide. And among those who feel wronged, you can tell there’s a palpable nostalgia, a longing for the good ol’ days that resemble a 1950s fairy tale. But because that failed to materialize… because work and marriage turned out to be less than the ideal, these men feel deprived of the American Dream. The result is their very real anger and a desire to blame someone.
Of course, that dissatisfaction can manifest itself in a hundred different ways. Certain things in the book point toward a tangible grievance like child custody in divorce proceedings, while other things are examples of totally irrational rage. For instance, Kimmel draws attention to the fact that mass shooters in the U.S. are overwhelmingly white males, which includes the recent murders in North Carolina.
To me, the book highlights a strong undercurrent in this country, unifying seemingly separate topics with a common thread. I was reminded of the sharp difference in reactions over law enforcement’s treatment of African Americans or debates about female contraception. On one hand, I think it’s legitimate to criticize the decline of the American Middle Class, but economic turmoil alone wouldn’t account for the visceral emotions on display in Angry White Men. To his credit, Michael Kimmel listens to and documents these feelings. However, the author also offers plenty of skepticism. Namely, that women, minorities, and social progress aren’t ever going back to 1950. And if some men believe everything is a zero-sum game, then they’re just destined to be pissed off in modern America.
Fortunately, I don’t think everyone is averse to change in their own lives or when it comes to ideas about masculinity. For example, parental involvement among men has dramatically increased over the last fifty years. That said, the difficult part going forward is this — In general, men are socialized in such a way that anger is the only acceptable emotion. They have all the other emotions, but these are often warped and channeled into anger and only anger. Adding a racial, economic, and historical dimension to all of this doesn’t simplify the issue, but it does emphasize the importance of emotional coping skills.
Yuri Gagarin in Space! – Vlad Men Companion Piece
Check out these documentaries on Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight into orbit:
Philosophy of Shaving 
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